Snopes, formerly known as the Urban Legends
Reference Pages, is one of the first online fact-checking websites. It has
been termed a "well-regarded source for sorting out myths and rumors"
on the internet. It has also been seen as a source for validating and debunking
urban legends and similar stories in American popular culture.
In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, that mainly presented search results of user discussions. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept where people could go to check facts by searches. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) as a username in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.
In 2002, the site had become well known enough that a television pilot called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks. Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup later became owners with Mikkelson through a partnership with the founders of a company called Proper Media. By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for the site "in several years" and David hired employees to assist him from Snopes.com's message board. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time, and Barbara no longer has an ownership stake in Snopes.com.
On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated a brokering agreement with Proper Media, the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. This prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. They raised $500,000 in 24 hours. Later, in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending.
Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. By March 2009, the site had more than 6 million visitors per month. Mikkelson runs the website out of his home in Tacoma, Washington.
Mikkelson has stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" when there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.
In 1994, David and Barbara Mikkelson created an urban folklore web site that would become Snopes.com. Snopes was an early online encyclopedia focused on urban legends, that mainly presented search results of user discussions. The site grew to encompass a wide range of subjects and became a resource to which Internet users began submitting pictures and stories of questionable veracity. According to the Mikkelsons, Snopes predated the search engine concept where people could go to check facts by searches. David Mikkelson had originally adopted the username "Snopes" (the name of a family of often unpleasant people in the works of William Faulkner) as a username in the Usenet newsgroup alt.folklore.urban.
In 2002, the site had become well known enough that a television pilot called Snopes: Urban Legends was completed with American actor Jim Davidson as host. However, it did not air on major networks. Christopher Richmond and Drew Schoentrup later became owners with Mikkelson through a partnership with the founders of a company called Proper Media. By mid-2014, Barbara had not written for the site "in several years" and David hired employees to assist him from Snopes.com's message board. The Mikkelsons divorced around that time, and Barbara no longer has an ownership stake in Snopes.com.
On March 9, 2017, David Mikkelson terminated a brokering agreement with Proper Media, the company that provides Snopes with web development, hosting, and advertising support. This prompted Proper Media to stop remitting advertising revenue and to file a lawsuit in May. In late June, Bardav—the company founded by David and Barbara Mikkelson in 2003 to own and operate snopes.com—started a GoFundMe campaign to raise money to continue operations. They raised $500,000 in 24 hours. Later, in August, a judge ordered Proper Media to disburse advertising revenues to Bardav while the case was pending.
Snopes aims to debunk or confirm widely spread urban legends. The site has been referenced by news media and other sites, including CNN, MSNBC, Fortune, Forbes, and The New York Times. By March 2009, the site had more than 6 million visitors per month. Mikkelson runs the website out of his home in Tacoma, Washington.
Mikkelson has stressed the reference portion of the name Urban Legends Reference Pages, indicating that their intention is not merely to dismiss or confirm misconceptions and rumors but to provide evidence for such debunkings and confirmation as well. Where appropriate, pages are generally marked "undetermined" or "unverifiable" when there is not enough evidence to either support or disprove a given claim.
In an attempt to demonstrate the
perils of over-reliance on the internet as authority, Snopes assembled a series
of fabricated urban folklore tales that it terms "The Repository of Lost
Legends". The name was chosen for its acronym, T.R.O.L.L., a reference to
the early 1990s definition of the word troll,
meaning an Internet prank, of which David Mikkelson was a prominent
practitioner.
Accuracy
Jan Harold Brunvand, a
folklorist who has written a number of books on urban legends and modern
folklore, considered the site so comprehensive in 2004 that he decided not to
launch one of his own to similarly discuss the accuracy or various legends and
rumors.
In 2012, FactCheck.org reviewed a sample of Snopes'
responses to political rumors regarding George W. Bush, Sarah Palin, and Barack
Obama, and found them to be free from bias in all cases. In 2012, The
Florida Times-Union reported that About.com's urban legends researcher
found a "consistent effort to provide even-handed analyses" and that
Snopes' cited sources and numerous reputable analyses of its content confirm
its accuracy. Mikkelson has said that the site receives more complaints of
liberal bias than conservative bias, but added that the same debunking standards
are applied to all political urban legends.
Funding
Critics of the site have falsely
asserted that it is funded by businessman and philanthropist George Soros, or
linked sites. Snopes said in 2016 that its revenue was derived from
advertising. In 2016, it also received an award of $75,000 from the James Randi
Educational Foundation, an organization formed to debunk paranormal claims. In
2017, it raised approximately $700,000 from a crowd-sourced GoFundMe effort and
received $100,000 from Facebook as a part of a fact-checking partnership.
Traffic and Users
As of December 2017,
Snopes.com's web traffic rank in the world stood at 3,798 with approximately
72% originating from the U.S. United States
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